I meant to blog something about this after it aired, but didn’t get round to it. So when Leah needed a quick review I thought I’d write something on it:
Review: Torchwood – Children of Earth
This five part miniseries, shown on consecutive nights over the course of a week, was a new format for Torchwood, the Dr Who spin-off series, bringing it to BBC1 and prime-time viewing for the first time after 2 seasons of relative obscurity in the listings. The teaser trailer pulled in large numbers of viewers for a slice of well-scripted, intelligent sci-fi written for the Spooks generation, where half the battle is fought against your own government.
The series really delivered, however, on the premise behind Torchwood as a series – this was Sci-fi for adults, with a decidedly different tone from Dr Who’s more family-friendly happy endings. As the series progressed it became clear that simple heroism wasn’t going to be enough to save the day, and the characters were left to make the second-best and last-resort choices that this sort of story usually doesn’t show people making. John Barrowman’s Captain Jack has never seemed more morally ambiguous, and the story went to extreme lengths to demonstrate that a man who cannot die can, in consequence, suffer a good deal more than any normal human being should. Gratifyingly, however, his suffering was not allowed to exonerate him from blame for the horrific choices he came to make.
Ultimately, as the subtitle suggests, this was a story about children. How we protect them, what value we place upon them, the things we sacrifice for them and the reasons we might make a sacrifice of them. The biggest underlying question was whether it is ever right to treat them as objects (whether that be drugs, ‘units’, or transmitters). Any TV series, Sci-fi or otherwise, that starts seriously exploring those issues is worth watching. The more so if, admirably, it refuses to close them with a ‘happy ever after’.
knittingvicar
hobbitvicar
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August 5, 2009 at 4:59 pm
MikeCamel
You might be interested in a post I made around the time:
http://www.p2ptrust.org/blog/2009_07_01_mikecamel_archive.html
-Mike.
August 11, 2009 at 7:32 pm
hobbitvicar
Thanks Mike, yes, interesting post. A friend of mine got quite interested in the substitutionary atonement angle too. I have deep reservations about using Jack’s sacrificing his grandson in his place as an example of sacrificial atonement, because it simply demonstrates the whole ‘cosmic child abuse’ interpretation. Essentially, this is Jack finding himself doing exactly what he did before and sacrificing children to appease the threatened wrath of angry ‘gods’. He is similarly doing exactly what he has been fighting against the government for agreeing to do: sacrificing unknowing children without their parent’s consent to save the rest of us. The only difference between them at the end of the day is that the government is acting on a larger scale and with greater efficiency. What he is doing is clearly wrong even within the context of the story itself, and the fact that it is all that he could do to prevent greater tragedy does not justify it, as he himself recognises. As I said, I think it is commendable, given the seriousness of the issues being explored, that the story doesn’t allow for a suffering-free solution. My slight quibble is that I think it was a mistake not to have Jack explain to the boy what they needed him to do and ask him if he would agree to it. That slight change to the storyline would have established that Jack stood for something different than the government and the 456, and it would have actually produced a sacrificial atonement that was less dysfunctional. And it’s what The Doctor would have done.